FreelanceNest: The Freelance Business Tracker for People Who Don't Want a $19/Month Subscription

Bonsai runs $25 a month. HoneyBook is $19. Dubsado is $20, 17hats is $15, Plutio is $19, and Agiled’s premium tier is $99 — all of them selling roughly the same thing: a place to track clients, send proposals, and get paid. If you’re sending three or four proposals a month, that’s real money going out every single month for software that, most weeks, you barely touch. FreelanceNest is built for that gap — a one-time purchase that covers the same ground without the recurring bill.

One board for the whole business

A dashboard opens on what actually needs attention — outstanding invoices, this month’s revenue, overdue payments, projects due soon, and a six-month revenue trend — instead of a wall of settings. Clients hold contact info and notes; projects live on a drag-and-drop board from Active through Archived, each with a fixed or hourly budget and a due date. Nothing is hidden three menus deep.

Proposals that already know the deal

This is the part a generic CRM doesn’t do well. FreelanceNest builds a proposal in any of 8 professional styles — from a plain Classic Corporate layout to a colored Modern Sidebar — and generates a matching service agreement from the exact same scope, timeline, and pricing you already entered. Set your terms once (revisions included, when IP transfers, cancellation notice, late fees) and every proposal-contract pair inherits them automatically. No retyping a deposit percentage into a second document and hoping it still matches the proposal three drafts later.

Getting paid, without a spreadsheet

Invoices carry real line items — description, quantity, rate — and total themselves. Anything past its due date flags itself as overdue automatically, and marking one paid takes one click. Every invoice prints as a clean, client-ready PDF. Time tracking sits right next to it: log hours per project, flag what’s billable, and see the dollar value update in real time, with a weekly summary so Friday doesn’t require adding up a week of sticky notes. Expenses get the same treatment — logged by category, with a checkbox for “rebill this to the client” so nothing billable quietly falls off an invoice.

Built to stay yours

FreelanceNest is a single HTML file that runs entirely offline — no account, no login, and nothing about your clients, contracts, or invoices is ever uploaded anywhere. It comes with three color themes (Indigo Ink, Warm Clay, and Charcoal Mono), and it’s a one-time purchase: buy it once and it’s yours, updates included.

Just need the proposal-and-contract piece on its own? The Proposal & Contract Bank covers that alone for $2.49. Already tracking payments with the free Invoice Tracker and ready for the rest of the business around it? FreelanceNest is where it grows into.

See it with sample client data filled in and buy FreelanceNest for $7.49 (50% off for a limited time).